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March 2013

Advances in the 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) market as well as in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) market have allowed silicon designers to increase the complexity in their silicon solutions to the point where the industry can actually think about these solutions in the plural sense, as System(s)-on-a-Chip (SoC).

Last week while traveling in the Bay Area, I forgot my GPS so I used my iPhone 4s to guide me around. My rental car came with a Microsoft SYNC USB connection, so I thought I’d have no problems using my phone with the car system. I plugged in my phone, input my next destination and was on my way. Not quite.

MapQuest audio was not working. I had to unplug the phone from the car to hear the turn by turn navigation. The iPhone 4s uses an A-GPS or assisted GPS and has an integrated digital compass, providing additional directional information. But for some reason, the mapping application was continually re-calculating. I was on the route, but the navigation system thought I was somewhere else!

I drove to the ISQED SensorsCon Conference and Becky Oh, President and CEO of PNI Sensors provided some great insight on sensors and the real world. Nine-axis sensing is common today. The combination of a gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetic sensors provide the tracking data to determine up and down, side to side, and back and forth movements. Sensors can register how fast we’re moving, which direction we’re facing, and turning radius.